The suits in law collectively known as the Slaughterhouse Cases went to the Supreme Court a hundred and fifty years ago, the first hearing of any legal disputes brought under the Fourteenth Amendment. The amendment consists of five sections, the fifth of which is the enforcement clause. The three preceding it have, until recently, been uncontentious. The opening section, on the other hand, contained such grandiose proclamations about rights and citizenship that it inevitably became what it is today: an endless cornucopia for privilege-seeking plaintiffs and ambitious jurists of the statist persuasion. But in 1873, a mere five years after its ratification, justices still understood that, for all its exalted prose, it had in fact been written with the targeted aim of ensuring that the liberties of former slaves, established in the 1866 Civil Rights Act, could not be revoked by a future majority in Congress — a guarantee secured when Union bayonets in Southern capitals made ratifying the amendment the mandatory price of readmission to the union.

While Slaughterhouse had nothing to do with race, the disgruntled butchers of New Orleans who brought the case invoked the Fourteenth Amendment’s sweeping guarantee of “privileges or immunities,” pleading that Louisiana had deprived them of their fundamental right to pursue a trade when it granted a monopoly franchise to the Crescent City Live-stock Landing and Slaughter-House. By narrowly scoping “privileges or immunities” to distinct national rights — like navigating federal waterways or petitioning Congress — the Court preserved the states’ traditional authority to regulate local health and commerce. Had the plaintiffs proven the monopoly was intended to oppress freedmen based on race, the decision would likely have been different. But in 1873, the justices closest to the amendment’s passage refused to invent a broad federal mandate out of a text written with the limited purpose of securing the rights of former slaves.

In time, however, such narrow construction gave way to far broader theories of selective incorporation and “substantive due process.” These doctrines became the favorite instruments of creative litigators who — by splicing the amendment’s declarations on “due process” and “equal protection” together with preferred passages from elsewhere in the Constitution — discovered “emanations” and “penumbras” of brand-new, federally enforceable rights. Thus, an amendment drafted to address the immediate aftermath of the Civil War evolved into a constitutional Swiss army knife, invoked to justify everything from birth control and employment quotas to presidential elections and gay marriage. Should the Court ever mandate unisex maternity wards or outlaw offensive speech, the Fourteenth Amendment will undoubtedly be the tool that activists use to build their case.

It is strange that advocates who stretch texts to fit their intentions should worry about constitutional justification at all. As long as they’re being arbitrary, why invoke the argumentum ab auctoritate? Perhaps it is because there is something intrinsically human in wanting at least a fig leaf of covering for our naked aggressions. If so, the Fourteenth Amendment has yielded a forest of fig trees for the crusaders of federal expansionism.

In declaring that no state could abridge the privileges or immunities of American citizens, nor deny them equal protection of the laws, the amendment’s framers left those terms largely undefined. While their immediate debates centered on protecting freedmen's basic rights to own property and access the courts, the final text invited far broader interpretation. In time, incorporationists argued that the amendment subjected state governments to the exact same constitutional strictures long imposed on Congress (effectively transforming “Congress shall make no law” into “No government, state or federal, shall make any law”).

It is unlikely that the congressmen and senators who drafted the amendment considered incorporation necessary when states already guaranteed these rights in their own constitutions. Nor is it reasonable to think that the legislators who ratified the amendment—especially in Northern states that had remained loyal to the Union—would have been eager to yield their local sovereignty to a federal judiciary that, just a decade earlier in Dred Scott, had effectively overturned the anti-slavery laws of the free states.

We can also deduce the limited scope of the Fourteenth Amendment from the amendment that immediately followed:

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Under today’s expansive doctrine of incorporation, the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantees of citizenship and equal protection would surely have encompassed the right to vote. But undercutting that generous interpretation is the fact that a supermajority in the subsequent Congress still felt compelled to pass the Fifteenth Amendment — a multi-state cat-herding procedure requiring three-fourths of the legislatures — simply to establish the suffrage rights of freedmen.

Until recently, only Section 1 has provided any utility for reconstructing this Reconstruction amendment. Today, however, Sections 3 and 4 have been unboxed and deployed to resolve modern political disputes that would have assuredly bewildered the members of the 39th and 40th Congresses who originally imposed these provisions.

For example, Section 3, in 1868, was clearly designed to keep unregenerate Confederates from making any further mischief with the nationalist agenda. The Radical Republicans had a continent to conquer and an industrial empire to build. Keeping the political class of the defeated South out of federal office ensured there would be no more filibustering against the tariff, and no committee room maneuvering against massive land subsidies for northern railroads. And the Senator from Massachusetts was presumably free to deliver his political tirades without fear of getting caned on the Senate floor by the Gentleman from South Carolina. The question of whether states could leave the union having been decided by force of arms, the victor couldn’t afford to admit the representatives it forbade to leave. Hence the section prohibiting anyone who had previously held office from holding further office if they had participated in rebellion.

Section 3 sat undisturbed in the jurisprudential closet for more than a century and a half before being dusted off in 2024 by enterprising litigators in Colorado, Illinois, and Maine in an attempt to strike Donald Trump from primary ballots. According to their interpretation, the former president was disqualified because of his role in instigating the events of January 6, 2021, when a mob rioted at the nation’s Capitol. Speaking at the Ellipse, Trump no doubt incited the crowd with the suggestion that Vice President Pence had the power to reject electoral slates — though he hardly specified by what means an anonymous gaggle of protesters could “peacefully and patriotically” convince him to do so.

But it stretches any reasonable definition of rebellion to equate the bloviating rhetoric and cynical opportunism of Donald Trump with the high-stakes, fatalistic gamble of Jefferson Davis, Alexander Stephens, or Robert E. Lee—men who drew the sword, threw away the scabbard, and wagered their lives and fortunes on a bloody war of secession rather than testing how far political theater could take them. Only a generation so thoroughly insulated from hardship could equate Trump’s political circus with actual, uniformed armies arrayed against the Union. If we were to accept their rationale, then every lawmaker who ever obstructed Congress, objected to electoral certifications, or fled a state legislature to kill a quorum would be equally guilty of insurrection.

Something on the order of a cannonade on Fort Sumter might reasonably justify invoking Section 3. Inciting a crowd to loiter noisily on federal property strays far from its letter. It was little surprise, then, that a unanimous Supreme Court shut down these state-level ballot removals in Trump v. Anderson, declaring that individual states have no business enforcing Section 3 against national candidates without congressional authorization.

On the other hand, keeping one’s political rivals out of power remains entirely true to its spirit.

Section 4 was resurrected during the budget standoff in the spring of 2023. According to that clause of the Fourteenth Amendment:

The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.

Having just financed an unprecedented war machine with massive deficits and a flood of paper “greenbacks” to subjugate the Confederacy, Republicans used Section 4 to bind future generations to honor every dime of Union war debt (and all federal debt to follow), while legally repudiating every bond, obligation, and financial instrument issued by the defeated Southern states.

Although extraordinarily partisan, the framers of Section 4 at least respected that the power to run America’s finances into the ground belonged to Congress. Modern invokers of the Public Debt Clause are no less partisan, but hold that the President has a constitutional duty to keep spending whenever the opposing party acquires enough clout in Congress to block a debt-limit increase. Although the so-called “debt ceiling” conveys a sense of fiscal restraint, it is in fact a tissue-thin impediment that Congress has never failed to raise after due hemming and hawing from members assigned the role of budget hawks. The “constitutional crisis” occurs when the hemmers and hawers look to have a real shot at maintaining the current limits against borrowing that has already been authorized. Those who would save us from such a crisis argue that if Congress refuses to raise the debt limit, the President is obliged to declare the ceiling unconstitutional and order the Treasury to keep issuing debt regardless.

As it turned out, Section 4 was reshelved when the theatrical standoff ended in the usual fashion: Congress suspended the $31.4 trillion ceiling, passing the problem to the next Congress while adding another $4.7 trillion to the national debt during the suspension period. Rather than resorting to dubious emergency constitutional provisions, President Biden signed a bipartisan agreement that was made into law and laughably named the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023.

Yet the argument remains on standby. Ironically, this scheme to turn a guarantee of post-Civil War solvency into an automatic, self-executing line of credit relies on a literal reading of the Fourteenth Amendment. By asserting that Section 4 creates an executive mandate to issue debt, proponents effectively set the amendment on a collision course with Article I, overriding both Congress’s explicit power to borrow money and its exclusive control over appropriations. If the black-and-white text of the amendment makes non-payment unconstitutional, then elected representatives forfeit their power over the purse whenever spending outpaces revenue.

Decades of elastic constitutional interpretation have already grown the federal Leviathan far beyond its original bounds. Yet the massive expansion to date pales beside the despotic power that could be unlocked by this newfound textual literalism for Section 4.

The context underlying the Debt Clause was one of extraordinary party dominance: the opposition was so utterly prostrate after the war that the Radical Republicans were able to ram through an amendment shielding their fiscal policy from political repeal. Stripped of that context and reduced to mere words on a page, “The validity of the public debt of the United States… shall not be questioned” takes on a terrifying implication. Followed to its absurd logical conclusion, if questioning the debt is forbidden, then criticizing federal spending—funded almost exclusively by debt—is no longer protected by the First Amendment.

While Sections 3 and 4 of the Fourteenth Amendment had to be resurrected decades after the reasons for their existence were dead and buried, the recent battle over birthright citizenship drafted the traditional workhorse of Section 1 for service in a brand-new conflict over policy. Once again, the phrasing intended by the framers specifically to protect newly freed slaves was sufficiently declamatory for inclusion in The Rights of Man and Citizen. “All persons born or naturalized in the United States,” argued the plaintiffs in Trump v. Barbara, makes no distinction of parentage: native or immigrant, invitee or gatecrasher. That invalidates Executive Order 14160, which denies passports and Social Security cards to infants born to mothers residing temporarily or unlawfully in the country. The administration countered that the plaintiffs’ definition omitted the critically restrictive clause, “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” insisting that mothers who entered unlawfully were properly the subjects of foreign jurisdictions.

The Senate debates of the 39th Congress show that the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment were evenly divided over what “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” actually meant — pitting restrictionists who demanded complete political allegiance against proponents of a broad territorial rule who openly acknowledged it would cover the children of foreigners. They ultimately sent it to the states without any further clarity. Meanwhile, state ratification records provide no support for either side in the immigration debate. During ratification from 1866 to 1868, the precise meaning of those five words was not even discussed. Consumed by the amendment’s more punitive provisions, state legislators accepted without argument the boilerplate text that codified traditional common-law birthright citizenship for Black Americans. The ratifying legislatures gave not a moment’s thought to the exact phrase modern lawyers spend millions fighting over today.

Many subsequent words were spilled, and many trees felled, producing the opinions in Trump v. Barbara—all of them attempting to extract a modern policy position from a document written for a completely different set of circumstances in another century. Rooting its decision in ancient English common law, the majority argued that the framers simply codified the feudal doctrine of territorial jurisdiction—where “jurisdiction” in 1868 meant nothing more than being physically bound by local laws and courts. By that logic, the justices might as well have argued that immigrants warehoused in ICE detention facilities are de facto proof that they are subject to American law.

But this interpretation ignores the congressional statute the Fourteenth Amendment was written to constitutionalize: the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which explicitly restricted birthright citizenship to those “not subject to any foreign power.” The dissent seized on that omission, noting that the American Revolution rejected the British rule of jus soli, where being dropped from the womb onto royal dirt conferred lifelong, involuntary subjecthood. Drawing a direct line from the Civil Rights Act to Section 1, the dissent made a coherent case that “jurisdiction” was not determined by geographical accident, but was a test of political allegiance that temporary visitors and foreign nationals simply cannot satisfy.

It is a charming theory, right up until the moment an “Accidental American” living in London—who hasn’t set foot in the States since infancy—discovers that feudal rules of jus soli still require him to report his foreign income to the IRS. More to the point, to construct this allegiance theory, the dissent had to read “lawful domicile” into an era where federal statutory categories like “unlawful presence,” “visas,” and “illegal alien” literally did not exist.

The fact that Congress submitted the amendment without clear agreement on the limits of citizenship, and that legislatures left no record of debating the subject, underscores that this question was never more than an academic exercise to its authors. After all, in 1868, there was no such concept as an “illegal immigrant.” While other countries were hemorrhaging emigrants to the United States, Americans were welcoming—legally, if not always socially—the tired, poor, and huddled masses. Immigrants arriving in this era expected nothing but the freedom to pursue happiness as they saw fit. Any social welfare aid was provided by churches and earlier waves of migrating countrymen. The government provided nothing beyond unpaved streets, a post office, and the occasional show of force against natives protesting the import of cheaper labor.

While any stowaway reaching American shores could try his luck, the path was brutal. Fully one-third of European immigrants returned to the mother country, where, not coincidentally, European governments were enacting social welfare programs to staunch the ruinous outflow of their labor force.

Unsurprisingly, “allegiance” and “lawful presence” only became pressing constitutional crises once the United States followed suit and built a welfare state of its own. In 1868, when the government offered nothing, a newcomer’s presence cost the public treasury nothing; his allegiance was tested daily by the raw market, and if he failed, he either starved, relied on charity, or bought a ticket home. It was only when American citizenship became the key to a vast network of state-funded benefits, entitlements, and administrative safety nets that the nation began frantically auditing who belonged. We wouldn’t be trying to shoehorn the Fourteenth Amendment into a modern immigration war—indeed, we likely wouldn’t have a case at all—had we not imported the very entitlement programs that made open borders unsustainable in the first place.

The tragicomedy of the modern immigration debate is that Congress’ “immigration policy” rests on an implied power necessary and proper for carrying out its express authority over Naturalization. The Constitution grants Congress the explicit right to determine how a foreigner becomes a citizen, but says precisely nothing about controlling borders, regulating visas, or deporting migrants. If the Fourteenth Amendment is to be forced into serving as the sole arbiter of who belongs, then the only logical absurdity left amid all the conflicting doctrines is to rule that anchor babies are wards of the state and their parents are to be sent home.

Having toured the modern misapplications of Sections 3 and 4, and having had an occasion to witness the tried-and-true Section 1 get redeployed on a new legal battlefront, one might wonder what became of Section 2, written to eliminate the Three-Fifths Clause by reducing the congressional representation of any state that denies or abridges its citizens’ right to vote. Here again, its purpose was aimed specifically to prohibit the vanquished South from undermining the freedman’s franchise, and the clause has yet to be invoked. But given the increasingly ferocious battles over gerrymandering, voter ID laws, and felon exclusions, it is only a matter of time before some inventive barrister in the rights industry argues that “All persons born or naturalized” makes no distinction between model citizen and recidivist, or even between adults and children.

To conclude: none of today’s political problems can be solved by appealing to the Fourteenth Amendment. Whether determining who appears on a presidential ballot, how the United States honors its public debt, or who qualifies for state-funded entitlements, the text offers no easy salvation. While no amendment is more sweeping in its language, none was more narrowly tailored in its true intent. Conceived in revenge and ratified at gunpoint, it was the victor’s terms of surrender dictated as a constitutional amendment, not a timeless charter for administering America’s 21st-century welfare state.

Catching up with friends and family after so long abroad, I am inevitably asked to comment on the difference between the American and European health care systems. In the increasingly fruitless effort to straddle the left-right chasm that has opened up on this as on so many issues, I hem and haw as diplomatically as possible and change the subject. But perhaps here, in writing, I can finish a thought or two without raising the ire or losing the acquaintance of people who, since I left nearly two decades ago, are conditioned to seeing caveated acceptance and nuanced disagreement as outright betrayal.

American Progressives want what Europe has. American conservatives fear it. As is so often the case, neither side has a firm grasp of what they think is going on in Europe. I can’t claim any expertise, myself. In fact, I know equally little about the “health care policies” of either place. But I do know that there is no such thing as a European health care system. There are as many systems in Europe as there are individual countries.

As a sovereign entity, Sweden sets its own policies for a population roughly the size of North Carolina, inhabiting an area slightly larger than California. So the first consideration for American admirers of the Swedish system is whether or not it can be scaled to a continent with a population 32 times greater. Pick any social issue where one side insists we adopt, and the other that we reject, the policy of the Old Country, and they are more than likely arguing over a fiction that does not exist. When we talk of setting such policies in Washington, it would be more appropriate to see if there is anything comparable in the EU capital of Brussels than in Stockholm or Berlin or Paris. If the progressives really wanted socialized medicine as they have it in Europe, they would have to discover a newfound respect for the virtues of federalism.

But if it is possible to take Sweden as a proxy for “the European model,” then I have to say, based on my experience, there is less on offer, but for less cost. Swedish physicians simply don’t issue as many prescriptions, make as many referrals for specialists and machine diagnostics, or recommend as many invasive procedures as American patients are accustomed to. Whether that is because of a lack of funding or because the population is generally healthier, the practical result is a medical culture that relies heavily on the patient’s own biological resilience. While most of the world addressed the COVID pandemic with draconian lockdowns, mask mandates and mRNA injections, Sweden famously maintained life as normally as possible, relying on voluntary common sense and natural herd immunity. (The maximum public venue size was ample enough to accommodate the three or four friends I knew well enough to have a drink with; the curfew for pubs and restaurants was well past my bed time; and the two-meter recommended social distancing was about half of the space that Swedes keep between themselves innately. Ergo, for me, life barely changed).

I discovered exactly how far the Swedish medical system is willing to test that biological resilience during a bout with a severe, rattling cough that I was absolutely certain required immediate antibiotics. I had to phone the clinic first, which insisted on a self-administered COVID test. When that came up negative, the clinic provided a “doctor’s note” instructing my employer to give me ten days off until my scheduled appointment, at which a nurse took blood samples, a doctor put a stethoscope to my chest, and I left with permission to take another week off and a bottle of morphine.

I knew the Swedes were very reluctant to prescribe antibiotics, but I was shocked at getting a morphine prescription for an undiagnosed cough. The doctor said it would help me sleep while my own antibodies kept up the fight. If I was still coughing in another week, I was instructed to call back to the clinic and schedule an X-ray. Here again, whether to spare the patient from trace amounts of radiation or to spare the state the steep cost of operating the machinery, the Swedish medical establishment is remarkably disciplined in rationing its high-tech diagnostics. As it turned out, the cough cleared up before an X-ray was necessary. I never found out what my blood was tested for, and never even got a diagnosis. On the plus side, I didn’t die and have barely had to clear my throat in the five years since.

The Moral Hazard of the Medical Buffet

In Sweden, the system expects you to weather the storm because you aren’t paying for a luxury consumer experience. Contrast this Nietzschean wellness approach to how it would likely have been handled in the States, where the health care consumer, insured through his employer, seeks medical attention from a doctor who doesn’t know the worth of his work and simply directs his patients to the billing department. Since the patient is only on the hook for a co-pay, the doctor might as well order a second opinion, a CT scan, and maybe a biopsy, just to be sure. And until there’s a diagnosis, treat the symptoms with a prescription or two. Not the generic stuff, but the patent-protected new miracle drugs that the patient saw on TV, the ones talked up by the pharma rep during the last all-expenses-paid golf trip.

The risk of abuse in a system whose beneficiaries don’t bear the full costs associated with that risk is known to economists as “moral hazard.” With the exception of banking, no sector in America is more rife with moral hazard than health care. As a mandated employee benefit, in which the corporate employer pays 83% of the premium for individuals, 73% for families, and in which the employee’s contribution is taken out before he’s handed his paycheck, the actual cost of insurance is barely visible. The consumer can hardly be blamed for utilizing every available test and prescription. When the system goes to such great lengths to hide the true price tag behind a flat, nominal co-pay, the patient treats that co-pay not as a fraction of the total charge, but as the entrance fee to a medical buffet—accepting the maximum level of care under the assumption that his premiums have already settled the rest of the tab.

Doctors and medical administrators likewise participate in the moral hazard. Justifiably terrified of malpractice litigation, they are already inclined to err on the side of doing too much rather than too little, but when the bill goes to the faceless insurance company and not to the patient standing before them, price discovery goes out the exam room window. There is no billing code for “watchful waiting” to see if the human immune system can heal the malady on its own.

With consumers and suppliers sheltered from the true costs, it is left to the insurance company to play the villain’s role of enforcing the mathematical reality, rationing care through sheer administrative inertia. This is the genesis of the uniquely American labyrinth of prior authorizations, out-of-network surprises, and arbitrarily denied claims. In a functioning free market, a business that offers abysmal customer service is swiftly punished by consumers who take their money elsewhere. But in the employer-sponsored model, the insurance company’s true customer is the human resources department. The patient is merely an end-user who cannot fire his insurer without quitting his job.

Not that long ago, the CEO of a major insurance conglomerate was gunned down in the street, prompting a wave of sympathy for the assassin from Americans who viewed his victim as a monster for routinely denying medical claims while raking in for himself an eight-figure salary. But under the circumstances, his extraordinary compensation made dark economic sense. In a system devoid of price discovery, he was paid handsomely to perform the most hated job in the market: the bureaucratic distributor of limited resources in the face of unlimited demand.

With almost no financial friction to discourage frivolous use, the comprehensively insured employee seeking an MRI for a tension headache can all-too-easily crowd out the oncology patient fighting for a life-saving biologic. When the American health care market is structurally incentivized to indulge the paranoia of the worried well, the desperately ill are the collateral damage, forced, at a time when they are most vulnerable, to take the offensive in a bureaucratic war of attrition. The system is profoundly cruel to those who are genuinely sick, but to lay blame exclusively with the insurance companies is to overlook our own culpability in demanding expensive, subsidized cures for trivial complaints and, in many cases, a lifetime of bodily neglect.

The Semantics of Health vs. Medicine

While Americans visit the general practitioner less frequently than Europeans, they lead the industrialized world in polypharmacy, high-tech diagnostics, and specialist interventions. We have come to treat our personal roster of specialists—my cardiologist, my neurologist, my endocrinologist—as a bizarre marker of middle-class status. Yet, for all our exorbitant spending, we are no healthier than industrialized nations that offer far less. By many metrics of chronic disease, we are in fact worse off. The fundamental error we make is semantic: what we are endlessly debating is not “health care,” but “medical care.” Genuine health has very little to do with hospitals, billing departments, and patented drugs.

Perhaps Europeans better understand this distinction. The Swedish approach to health seems to begin long before a patient goes to the clinic, with walking and cycling serving as modes of transportation much more relied on than in the US, and a diet that largely excludes toxic preservatives, artificial dyes and hyper-processed chemical additives. In fact, the European Union strictly regulates or outright bans many of the ingredients found in American grocery stores. I am not advocating any such nanny-state laws here; grown boys and girls should be perfectly capable of exercising personal discipline in the management of their own pantries. But we cannot ignore how a highly processed diet, chronic sleep deprivation, relentless stress, and a sedentary lifestyle correlate with the chronic illnesses that clog our medical infrastructure.

But even if we were to make the necessary physical adjustments and properly redefine health care as the individual’s responsibility, we would still need to re-calibrate our understanding of the concept of medical insurance. The fundamental purpose of any insurance is catastrophic risk management—a pooling of capital to protect against the ruinous financial impact of the unforeseen, like a house fire or an earthquake. An annual physical, a prescription for a common rash, even the setting of most broken bones, were once paid for out of savings, for the very reason that they were common enough events that everyone was expected to plan for them. As Lanhee Chen of the Hoover Institution observed, the American model of health coverage operates more like a prepaid service plan than actual insurance. Chen contrasts it with auto insurance, which protects the policy holder from a sudden car wreck, but doesn’t cover routine maintenance like replacing brake pads or getting an oil change, because there is no risk to pool against. Everyone needs an oil change.

If we insured our vehicles the way we insure our bodies, we would expect our auto policy not only to cover oil changes, but also wiper fluid, and a weekly run through the car wash. We would immediately recognize how absurdly more expensive and bureaucratic car ownership would be than it already is.

The Pre-Paid Service Plan Collapse

Yet, we insist on forcing third-party payers to cover the full range of diagnostics and pharmaceuticals whenever we get the seasonal flu. When confronted with the compounding absurdities, the progressive reflex is to advocate for a single-payer system. This is essentially arguing that because third-party coverage with a handful of insurance corporations has destroyed price discovery, we should consolidate that coverage under one plan run by the government. This ignores both the staggering scale of the United States and the cultural reality of our medical entitlement. Pooling the risk of 340 million people into a single government monopoly, while maintaining the expectation that this monopoly must fund the routine care of an unhealthy population, is a prescription for administrative collapse.

Even in Sweden, with a presumably healthier baseline and a population the size of North Carolina, a growing percentage of citizens are purchasing private supplemental insurance simply to bypass the wait times of their socialized system. A government monopoly, instead of eliminating the need for rationing, would simply replace a script-reading claims clerk with a federal review board. With either version of third-party insurance, be it employer-mandated or single-payer, the relentless demand will continue to drive up premiums, co-pays and subscription costs, and drive down the overall standard of care.

For the sorely afflicted and hypochondriac alike.

Our Necessary Evil

We bought a car. For seventeen years in Sweden, we got along splendidly without one. We biked to work. We walked to the store, or took one of the quiet bio-fueled buses to the city center. We rode the trains to other cities. If we were out past the hour that services shut down, we paid for a cab or an Uber.

Not having a car — the payments, the repairs, the insurance, and the taxes — more than made up for the occasional costs of public transport. If we sacrificed the spontaneity that car ownership offers, the frequency and punctuality of the buses required only a moment’s forethought to up and go wherever we pleased. When we traveled somewhere that a car was needed (such as our home leave to the United States), we rented one at the airport or train station. The high daily cost of renting a car a few weeks each year was far cheaper than the ongoing costs of owning it.

But now that we’re back in the land of the free and the home of the drive-thru, car-lessness is a luxury we can’t afford. We paid cash for a used vehicle, nothing fancy, but comfortable enough to ride out the holiday gridlock, the fender benders, the road rage and the sweltering asphalt canyons formed by miles of sound barriers paneled along America’s suburban neighborhoods.

For shorter distances, we still walk, to the amusement of the neighbors, down the busy boulevards and across several blacktop parking lots to the supermarket, buying no more than we can carry home by hand. Our new hometown at least has narrow strips marked off for bicycles on the side of the highway — an encouraging development in some American cities, but well short of the systemic infrastructure of Northern and Western Europe, which integrates bicycle and pedestrian traffic as equal parts of the urban transit network, and not as afterthoughts to automotive travel.

Why Alternative Transportation Allegedly Won’t Work

Whenever someone longingly observes that Europe, or Japan, possesses a functioning, civilized web of public transit, walkable streets, and bike paths, the American nativist is quick to dismiss such commie talk Res Judicata: There’s clearly no profitability in running rail lines through the barely inhabited expanses that separate America’s cities. Exhibit A is the persistent financial anemia of Amtrak; Exhibit B: the multi-billion-dollar bureaucratic circus known as the California High-Speed Rail project.

This failures are just as glaring at the local municipal level. When New York City attempted to expand its network with the Second Avenue Subway, it cost a staggering $2.5 billion per mile—making it the most expensive transit project in world history, utterly incapable of ever paying for itself through passenger fares. Across the country, legacy networks like the San Francisco Bay Area’s BART and Atlanta’s MARTA have similarly devolved into permanent fiscal swamps. Plagued by collapsing farebox recovery rates, bloated operating overhead, and routing that caters to political optics rather than actual commercial density, these systems hose billions in local tax subsidies just to keep their half-empty trains running. With good reason, inner-city buses and subways in the US, with few exceptions, are written off as a permanent tax drain—shabby, unsafe, and ridden only by those who can't afford better.

Walking is for the treadmill, at the gym, that you drive to. Cyclists are soy-boy a**holes just begging for the victim status conferred by the next accident they cause.

And whatever might be said in favor of the fresh air and community that the non-automotive commuter enjoys, sidewalks and bike paths are the camel’s nose in the tent. Before long, we’ll be imprisoned in 15-minute cities and expected to be happy with owning nothing.

It’s not surprising mass transit caught on in Europe. Bewitched by socialism, the Europeans harbor a herd-like suspicion of the naked individualism required by the open road. As for the Japanese, their excellent public transportation system can be forgiven on account of the sheer density of their population.

But this is America, where the market has spoken in favor of the automobile!

Far be it from us to question how free people choose to get from point A to point B. Indeed, while there are aspects of the fifteen-minute city we find appealing, we’d be the first to storm the barriers if the Climate-Nazis in central planning tried to corral us into one of them for our own good.

The problem with the argument over mass transit and walkable cities in the United States, however, is that both sides assume they aren’t possible without massive subsidization and eminent domain confiscations by the state. While it is hard to imagine there isn’t at least some role for a government whose representatives negotiate the many conflicts of interests that any large, inter-community project is bound to beget, the idea that it can only be accomplished through the brute force of politics — damn the costs — ignores the private innovations and commercial logic that have made it successful in other parts of the world as well as in the early days of American urban development.

Indeed, we can never know for certain what contemporary urban and inter-regional transport would look like had we not diverged from the original path, but we do know that the path that was ultimately taken was hardly a laissez faire phenomenon, and in fact required substantial government intervention that continues to this day.

The Forgotten Free Market in American Mass Transit

American streetcar and interurban networks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries operated on the premise of free enterprise. In dense, walking-dependent cities, the volume of riders at the standard “nickel fare” brought in substantial revenues. At the end of their lines, transit companies built the first amusement parks, or “trolley parks,” which helped sustain passenger demand over the weekend. In smaller towns, land companies built trolley systems that were used as loss-leaders to open up cheap properties on the urban periphery.

Of course, when there was no more money to be made in suburban land speculation, these companies could no longer afford the loss on streetcars and abandoned the transit business. The over-leveraged among them went bankrupt. But the brighter side of a collapsing enterprise is that debts are cleared and assets are sold for pennies on the dollar to the highest bidder. With tracks laid and a fleet of functioning trolleys already in the inventory, a risk-taker less burdened by debt could take his turn at putting those assets to use more profitably than his predecessors. In other words, the disappearance of the land speculators that sponsored small-town streetcars is not in itself a sufficient explanation for the disappearance of small-town streetcars.

Indeed, the transit operations abandoned by real estate developers were often taken over by utility companies, although they, too, did not profit directly from passenger fares. Rather, in the era before grid-scale energy storage, they continued running them at a loss in order to maintain a high base load of electricity. Compared to the residential demand for electricity, which peaked in the evening and almost vanished in the morning, streetcar systems demanded a constant and high volume of supply, which justified capital expenditure on newer, larger, more efficient turbines, which lowered the cost per kilowatt per hour. Thus, passenger fares were still subsidized by the electric company’s non-passenger customers, but residents and businesses were still getting more electricity for cheaper than they could without the streetcar’s demand for base load (Naturally, less expensive electricity inspired new demand from newly invented home appliances and office machinery).

By contrast, the regional and continental railway systems —with one monumental free-market exception — were built on an orgy of land speculation and graft that make Amtrak and California’s high speed rail project look like models of fiscal restraint. Paid by the mile, the so-called “robber barons” laid lines that meandered through the longest routes possible, and deliberately went out of their way to find mountains and other obstacles that paid a higher rate per mile than easier, flatter terrain. Land grants that in aggregate comprised an area larger than the state of Texas were supposed to be sold to settlers to help pay for the tracks, but instead were collateralized for the railroad’s own bond-issuing schemes. Communities that refused to buy the bonds or otherwise pay for the privilege of future freight service were ruthlessly bypassed in favored phantom towns that were hastily erected on company property. Legislators and government officials at every level accepted company stock to look the other way.

Although credited in the editorial pages for “wedding the Atlantic to the Pacific,” the political entrepreneurs directing the railroad projects had a limitless and shameless capacity for bilking the government that more than justifies today’s skeptic of mass transit in America.

The magnificent exception was James J. Hill’s Great Northern Railway, built across the wilderness from St. Paul to Seattle without a penny of state subsidies or a single acre of government-granted land. In true capitalist fashion, Hill acquired vast tracts at bargain prices following the bankruptcies of his state-subsidized predecessors, who couldn’t turn a profit even when given the lands for free. Because Hill was risking his own capital, he scouted the lowest mountain passes to save coal and actively cultivated a sustainable economic community of immigrant farmers at each stage before pushing his tracks forward to the next. This approach left his company solvent when the rest of the industry collapsed in the Panic of 1893. He proved that free-market rail transit could work in America, provided real economic discipline was allowed to dictate the routes.

International Models: How the Rest of the World Moves

Hill’s strategy was similar to that of the private corporations that currently run the highly profitable and flawlessly punctual rail lines in Japan, and likewise without continuous government bailouts. In 1966, the state-owned Japanese National Railways (JNR) revolutionized rail transport with its high speed Shinkansen (bullet train), but it could not sustain its success amid crippling worker strikes, its notoriously bureaucratic treatment of customers, and the need to service unprofitable rural outposts with more voters than paying customers. And given its stark contrast with the privately run Hankyu and Tokyo lines which surpassed it by any metric: comfort, cleanliness, punctuality and hospitality, the intractably-indebted JNR was broken up geographically and privatized in 1987.

The new regional companies that took over from JNR followed the same path as Japan’s preexisting private lines, and in fact that James Hill had taken many decades earlier with the Great Northern. They recognized, much like the operators of early twentieth-century American streetcars, that the real commercial fortune was not to be found in the transportation, per se, but in building the markets for their trains to service. By transforming their urban terminals into massive high-density retail hubs, office towers, and hotels, the newly privatized rail companies captured the immense land value generated by their own passengers.

To three of the rural companies, the government gave a one-time endowment, prohibiting them from touching the principal for everyday operations. Instead of annually subsidizing the money-losing rural routes, the companies were forced to survive on their own investment yields and aggressive commercial diversification. State intervention in Japan was not non-existent, but it was designed to transition infrastructure into self-sufficiency, rather than provide a subsidized safety net in perpetuity.

In Sweden, the state plays a larger role but still relies on a highly competitive bidding process for servicing its defined routes. The rails and roads are maintained by the government, but which government depends on the scale and type of transit. For the national rail lines, high-speed tracks, and major highways that connect different cities, the physical infrastructure is owned and maintained by the central government’s Swedish Transport Administration. Infrastructure for city streets, local bus lanes, pedestrian walkways, and urban bicycle path networks is owned and maintained by the local municipality. But the rail cars and buses are owned and operated privately, and strict, blind-bidding for contracts takes place regularly.

Not every country with a public transport system has the same degree of market discipline and efficiency. Germany, for example, operates its national railway system, Deutsche Bahn, as a state-owned monolith that has become a global byword for chronic delays, bureaucratic bloat, and decaying infrastructure. Because the German government has protected the company from true market competition, the system suffers from the exact same institutional rot that plagued Japan’s JNR before 1987. Technically, Deutsche Bahn was “privatized “ as a joint-stock company, but with 100% of the shares in government hands, and lacking the blind-bidding competition of Sweden or the real-estate driven profit motive of Japan, Germany’s network has devolved into a fiscal black hole where political directives override economic logic, resulting in a railroad plagued by record delays and multi-billion-euro bailouts.

China bypassed the market entirely to construct both the world’s largest high-speed rail network and a staggering 110,000-mile expressway system in just a few decades. The Chinese have managed to do what neither Amtrak, the California High-Speed Rail Authority, nor most of America’s nineteenth-century rail barons could do: build a remarkably efficient mass transit system with state funding. Yet the long-term economic repercussions of Beijing’s rail monopoly remain entirely unknown. After all, the state-owned Japanese National Railways was also once a modern marvel and the envy of the world before it slid into the bureaucratic quicksand. The opportunities missed and the unforeseen costs to be paid have yet to be revealed.

No system of mass transit was developed without at least some state involvement. Even the Great Northern Railroad benefited second-hand when it cheaply acquired lands and assets from distressed companies that failed despite the support of generous grants and subsidies. But clearly, we have examples from both past and present that refute the notion that trains and trolleys and better buses are impossible without the socialists’ expropriation and allocation of resources. If anything, with the exception of China, which is too recent to judge, our examples suggest that the lighter the hand of the state, the more successful the market’s invisible hand in bringing about this public good.

State Intervention on Behalf of the US Road System

The gaping irony of America’s current paucity of public transit offerings is, in fact, that its automobile supremacy owes much to the intrusion of government policies. The first car produced affordably for the common man, Henry Ford’s Model T, appeared on American roads only a few years before the country’s entry into World War I, an inflationary event of a severity not seen since the Civil War over fifty years prior. But the city governments that had granted franchises to trolley companies refused to allow those companies to raise the “nickel fare” to accommodate their rising operating costs. To make matters worse, continuing the nineteenth century mandates that they pay for paving the roads between and around their tracks was essentially providing a subsidy for the automobiles that used those roads. Starved of revenue and forced to maintain the roadway for their competitors, the streetcar companies couldn't afford to modernize or maintain their fleets, making them ripe for bankruptcy and dismantling.

Whereas the so-called “private railroads” failed with free land and government subsidies, the automobile manufacturers never had the responsibility for maintaining the transportation infrastructure. They merely made vehicles and sold them to the consumer, while the entire “track network” on which their cars ran was built, owned and maintained by the taxpayer. In 1956, subsidization went national when the Federal-Aid Highway Act inaugurated the largest public works program in American history, capitalizing on Cold War anxieties to build the “National System of Interstate and Defense Highways.” Of total government spending on roadworks, 20% to 25% now comes from Washington, almost all of it earmarked for capital spending on initial construction or expansion of interstate corridors.

As state governments have come to depend on this largesse, the strings attached have included the federal government’s right to micromanage speed limits, the minimum drinking age, and the wages of road crews — even the temporary operations of roadside taco trucks during the COVID-19 pandemic. Funding the lucrative capital expenditures while leaving states and municipalities on the hook for the permanent cost of maintenance, the federal government has effectively turned state transportation departments into administrative branches of Washington in a top-down, subsidized highway system that has made driving seem cheap by foisting its massive infrastructure expenses onto the general public.

When local governments attempt to expand or alter this subsidized infrastructure, the absence of market discipline is glaring. Boston’s notorious 'Big Dig,' which simply buried a few miles of downtown highway, ballooned into a staggering $14 billion taxpayer nightmare—proving that whether the state is laying tracks or laying pavement, insulation from economic reality virtually guarantees a permanent drain on the public purse.

The Hidden Tax of Zoning and Parking

Meanwhile, socializing America’s roadworks is only half of the economic equation. Automobiles traditionally spend the vast majority of their time in park, which means a system that caters to individual car transportation requires an unprecedented amount of parking space. Even when municipalities do not directly build or fund parking infrastructure, local zoning codes legally compel private businesses to dedicate vast portions of real estate and construction budgets to mandated parking areas. Because these enterprises cannot realistically recoup their costs through parking fees alone, the expense is subtly clawed back via higher prices on everyday goods and services—effectively forcing everyone, driver and pedestrian alike, to underwrite the cost of customer automobile parking.

Other nations are more reluctant to bury the overhead for parking under the price of consumer commerce. Sweden, for example, allows developers flexibility (flexibla parkeringstal) to reduce or even eliminate minimum required parking space if a project is tied to urban transit access. In Japan, overnight street parking is illegal, and you cannot even register a vehicle until you prove to the local police that you pay for a private, off-street garage space—which is exactly the kind of personal accountability one would expect from a country that famously refuses to provide public trash cans. By not treating public asphalt as free storage, these systems force the driver, rather than the general consumer, to bear much more of the real cost of owning an automobile.

Worthy of note, wherever public transit is a sustainable local option, so too is cycling and walking. Where public buses, subways and trams reduce the volume of vehicles requiring active lane space and parking, it naturally leaves room for human-powered forms of transit. To be fair, it is usually not without a nudge from political authorities. For example, across Western and Northern Europe—from the Benelux nations to France, Germany, and Austria—national planning policies tie road funding to the concurrent construction of protected bike paths and continuous sidewalks, transforming walking and cycling from marginalized urban afterthoughts into competitive, everyday choices.

The Household Costs of Automobile-Centric Policies

Government also interferes in America, but in a way that seems to have reduced the pedestrian and bicycling alternatives. Through a combination of single-use zoning restrictions and post-war credit manipulation, it has, wittingly or unwittingly, engineered a pervasive system of car-dependency. By outlawing mixed-use development at the municipal level and using Federal Housing Administration (FHA) rules to deny government-backed mortgages to dense, walkable neighborhoods, the state has arbitrarily severed where Americans live from where they work. As it has chosen to underwrite suburban sprawl while legally barring commercial hubs from residential zones, the average American has been pushed over twelve miles away from the office, and is generally required to get in the car for a grocery run or a doctor’s visit. Because the zoning mandates structurally pull a family's daily destinations in different directions, a single vehicle is rarely enough to keep a household functional. For many Americans, maintaining a fleet of private vehicles has become less a symbol of personal freedom and more of a non-negotiable household burden.

Defenders of the American model are quick to point out that U.S. drivers enjoy relatively cheap gasoline, and that our roads are largely self-funded by gas taxes acting as a direct user fee. While this is partially true—even if those highway funds increasingly rely on general tax bailouts to cover deferred maintenance—focusing on fuel prices obscures the real financial trap. The true measure of a system’s economic efficiency isn’t the cost of gas, or even transportation cost per mile. It is the total transportation burden per capita.

According to 2024 Bureau of Transportation Statistics, the average cost of owning and operating a private vehicle is roughly $0.82 per mile. But having to navigate an environment that scatters daily life across sprawling distances, Americans routinely find themselves logging a staggering number of miles just to complete basic household routines. Compare this to nations that do not treat the automobile as a default utility. Not only is the baseline cost of a monthly transit pass fundamentally cheaper than car ownership, but because of denser, mixed-use development, their citizens do not have to travel nearly as far to live their daily lives.

The American advantage of cheaper fuel is ultimately erased by the mandatory volume of travel. For the average multi-car suburban household, the infrastructural absence of alternative transit options means that upwards of 16% of a family’s income is tied up in multiple, rapidly depreciating assets that sit idle for most of their lifespans on expensive, government-mandated asphalt.

Conclusion

We started this missive lamenting that, on both sides of the debate, mass transit is viewed as an impossibility without the state significantly commandeering resources and overriding market preferences. The left half is fine with that arrangement, while the right half decries the history of economic failures that have resulted from this approach and that continue to squander tax dollars down to the present. The verdict of the latter is that mass transit is a statist institution unsuited to US soil, where the automobile stands supreme as the symbol of individual freedom.

But as we have shown, countries with enviable public transit, as well as ample, safe routes for pedestrians and cyclists, are not inherently more collectivist in their approach to transportation, nor should the virtual absence of any alternative to the automobile in America be mistaken for de facto evidence of the invisible hand at work. The state has played a significant role in both the economic failure of mass transit and the seeming economic success of the automobile.

It should by now be apparent that the last thing we would urge is the doubling down on more of the same, that is, excessive intervention by government — either for subsidizing the status quo or for mandating alternatives. We can not claim to know what the results would be if we had a more market-oriented approach to transportation and urban development, but we like to think that American travelers might discover what we learned in Sweden, that trains and bicycles are elegant, less stressful alternatives for human conveyance.

We would gladly invest the cost of our next automobile toward an enterprise with a profitable proposal that freed us from the obligation of owning one.

America the Virtuous: The Crisis of Democracy and the Quest for Empire

Claes G. Ryn.
New Brunswick
Transaction
2003.
0-7658-0219-8
$34.00.

An exceptionally fine explication of America’s current predicament in world affairs. The author takes great pains to define current political and cultural terms, distinguishing their traditional meanings from the bellicose connotations into which our national dissemblers have successfully twisted them (Clinton’s crowd as much as Bush’s). In so doing, Professor Ryn redraws an important link, explained by Irving Babbitt and other observers as early as the First World War, between the American government’s unrestrained militarism abroad and the inspiration it draws from a parallel abandonment of moral contraints in the individual American citizen.

It is not, however, a “Blame-America-First” book. Indeed, the nationalistic virus to which America has been succumbing, as Dr. Ryn points out, made its first appearance in revolutionary France (which makes our current vilification of the French somewhat ironic, if not hypocritical). After a century of near dormancy, the contagion later raged through Europe at large, leading to that continent’s great suicide attempt of 1914-1945. From 1917 until the end of the Cold War it took its biggest toll in Russia. The fact that many of America’s staunchest anti-Communists are themselves suffering from the Communists’ hallucinations of imperialist impulses gives testimony to the resiliency and subtlety of the disease.

As far back as twenty years ago, it began infecting certain quarters of the American academy, but has only recently spread to mainstream journalism and party politics. As the author explains, the intellectuals who have been urging our current global project have, through highly selective references to Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian and European and American experiences, distilled a political ideology that is in fact contrary to the values of Western and American civilizations (and any other civilization, for that matter). While they often battle in the editorial pages against “Post Modern” liberalism’s nihilistic rejection of authority and tradition, theirs is a highly questionable authority derived from a practically fictitious tradition.

Indeed, Ryn believes they have more in common with their Post Modern adversaries than they realize, because at heart they are equally contemptuous of the hierarchical arrangements and institutional customs that the world’s diverse societies have evolved and adapted over the centuries in answer to the changing conditions of particular places in particular times. If the Post Modernists claim there is no authority beyond individual needs and perceptions, today’s hegemonists proclaim the superior authority of abstract principles derived by reason and unencumbered by consideration for the messy details of actual human history. Thus, as is not surprising to any civically informed observer of our so-called “War on Terrorism” - an abstract idea in its own right -- the imperialist philosophy in practice proves to be as callously indifferent towards the constitutional limits on the federal government as it is to the non-democratic traditions in the Middle East.

The catastrophic murders of September 11 certainly justified an armed reprisal, in so far as military action could be used to punish or apprehend the planners and instigators, as well as perhaps to deter similar terrorist assaults in the future. However, this simple mandate based on the traditional and internationally accepted concept of “just war” was metamorphasized by the administration’s hawks and their cheerleaders in “conservative” journals and talk-shows into nothing less than a crusade for bringing “capitalism,” “freedom,” and “democracy” to a region of the world that has known at least some of the blessings of civilization for more than five thousand years.

Notwithstanding that circumstances on the ground have proven to be more intractable than the ideologues had originally guessed, they continue to claim for the United States a unique, messianic status that requires us to bear any cost in blood and treasure to extend the frontiers of Reason. Confusing and conflating legitimate self-defense with the ends of empire, they have, wittingly or otherwise, distorted America’s image of itself, using the language of piety and patriotism to mask a formidable will to power.

Having traced the source of this virus of “neo-Jacobinism” to certain strains of ahistorical, Enlightentment thinking, Ryn cautions that it appears to be on the ascent in Twenty-First Century America, a nation that has assembled unto itself more might in nearly every respect than all the powers of all the ages of the Earth. America the Virtuous alerts us to the temptations and the likely disastrous consequences of such power in the service of excessive national pride untempered by the humility that comes with genuine historical self-awareness.

Ryn’s is the warning of a true patriot, not the flattery of America’s honey-tongued agents of destruction.

Although the entire world follows the soap opera of American politics, I somehow managed to remain blissfully ignorant of the current “partial government shutdown” until yesterday. Reviewing our travel plans for returning to the United States after seventeen years abroad, we’ve learned that, after a 9-hour flight from Europe and more than a week of waiting to see our dog, we can look forward to an 80% chance of missing our connection and having to stay the night in Chicago.

It seems that agents of the Transportation Security Administration, responsible for fondling old ladies and screening the dainties of the air traveling public in America, are not showing up for work, on account of not being paid, and that they are not being paid on account of the political volleyball that the two parties are playing with the Department of Homeland Security budget.

Believe it or not, fondling and dainties-screening are not at issue. Rather, TSA’s funding is being held hostage to the debate over the funding of a sibling agency. If the Transportation Security Administration reported to the Department of Transportation instead of to the Department of Homeland Security, there’s a good chance we’d only have to put up with the regular inconveniences of flying rather than waiting in long lines due to a shortage of uniformed gropers. But TSA is part of DHS, which is also the parent organization of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency over which the budget battle lines have been drawn.

One side wants to end warrantless raids and the unadjudicated deportations of undocumented immigrants. The other argues that if we don’t halt and reverse the flow of illegal aliens who refuse to enter the country through the front door, we have no way of knowing what diseases and criminality we’re importing. One side accuses the opposition of wanting to flood the voting booths with non-citizens beholden to their political benefactors in the welfare state. The other decries their opponents’ campaign to frighten the nativists into supporting authoritarian measures that will keep them in power.

Each camp presents evidence that confirms their accusations, at least anecdotally. When the next election is likely to reverse the course of any investigation, proving systemic malfeasance is not only difficult; it is also beside the point. The point is counting coup, propagating an eschatological narrative before the cameras, amplifying it through the social media echo chamber, and ultimately corralling the rabble into one of two easily manipulated blocks of voters.

Scrupling over the funding of government agencies allows a politician to look principled while publicly excoriating his adversary for being unreasonable. It doesn’t matter which politician and which mob he is appealing to. The tactics are the same. The mob will get in line and follow his tune. In the zero sum world of modern ochlocracy, preventing the funding of one mob’s phobia is as important as funding the other mob’s rights.

Except, at some point, it all gets funded. Protests simmer down, headlines move elsewhere, and deals are made in private. Until then, travelers across the globe must endure another quarrel in Washington.

Meanwhile, as my wife and I make final preparations to migrate home from the Old World, I call to mind my great-grandfather’s emigration to Michigan. That generation of immigrants was promised nothing. They came anyway, and then they took the jobs of the natives whose services were overpriced. That is the American Way, as American as rioting against the immigrants coming after your job.

It causes me to wonder: If the federal government had no authority to promise anything to any constituency, which way would net migration go? World we still attract the sort who only want a chance to work, save, and provide opportunity for their children? If that is what we want, we certainly have made it more difficult to enter legally than when my great-grandfather came. Or, would the native-born, having grown accustomed to generations of government-sponsored incentives, join the exodus when the government’s money well inevitably runs dry?

I also wonder about the irritating possibility of missing my connection because of people not showing up to do a job I’d just as soon they not do at all.

When I left America, the whole bureaucratic apparatus known as Homeland Security was just maturing, created several years prior after nineteen lunatics with box cutters provoked the largest overreaction in American history (up to that time, at least). On the morning of that late summer day that “changed everything,” there were already bureaucracies and procedures in place when the lunatics slipped through them. In the after action reports, after all the speeches and congressional testimonies had finally concluded, the most useful lessons learned from the attack were the need to A) share information in a more timely manner among the sixteen agencies involved and B) reinforce the cockpit door and keep it locked. (It stands to reason that box cutters can’t endanger a flight if they can’t be applied to the pilot’s throat.)

But to make sure that box cutters never threatened our skies again, over the next ten years we increased our spending on military ordnance and hardware by 50%, adjusted for inflation, as compared to 13.5% percent on everything else. A few generals and admirals warned that expanding our high-tech weaponry would prove ineffective against our likely enemies, but saner voices were overruled in the race to hand out contracts to political donors, jobs to constituents, and capital gains to Wall Street insiders placing their bets on the arms industry.

Of course, terrorists don’t need to terrorize as much among a people that willingly imprisons itself at its own expense. Budgets ballooned for domestic surveillance and security; in fact, they more than doubled the first year after the September 11 attacks. This ushered in a massive consolidation of 22 agencies into the DHS alongside a radical expansion of new federal bodies like the TSA, the Office of Director of National Intelligence and the National Counterterrorism Center, with its 80 “fusion centers” across the country that aggregate state and local law enforcement data into a continental dragnet of information on American citizens. Our borders have become a mesh of fortifications, with a Wall that could serve just as well to keep us in as to keep them out. Even the banking system was pressed into service with tighter reporting obligations and anti-money laundering procedures that require customers to justify transactions with their own deposits.

It would appear that when we crusaded abroad in undeclared wars to “fight the terrorists over there, so we don’t have to fight them over here,” we also turned the might of the state inward on ourselves, militarizing domestic protest responses, expanding warrantless surveillance, restricting our movements, requiring us to explain where we got our money and how we intend to spend it, renditioning suspects to secret camps abroad without habeus corpus or a hint of concern for due process, and subjecting the swarthier among us to show their papers on demand. To add insult to injury, it has all been saddled on the backs of our children’s children to pay for.

Given that the pretext for all this debt, war and diminishment of our freedom was to prevent a repeat of 9/11, we must never forget that one of those planes, United Flight 93 — aimed toward Washington, DC, perhaps toward the White House — never made its destination because the passengers aboard, learning the fate of three other flights that morning, overcame the hijackers and sacrificed themselves to bring the aircraft down before any more innocents were harmed.

What need have we of this Panopticon world we are building in a nation that has such brave and vigilant citizens? What further proof need be offered that a goon with government benefits could not possibly be more conscientious about the safety and security of a flight than the people who are boarding it?

Everyone wants safe flights, including pilots and flight attendants and fleet owners who don’t want to lose inventory, let alone customers (the dead ones are particularly bad for repeat business) -- and lawsuits. If paying customers want pre-boarding security measures, it can be included in the cost of the ticket without the non-flying taxpayer having to subsidize an army of compliance workers, without which the airlines would be forced to compete on safety in addition to routes, comfort, timeliness and price.

Our economy has been so grotesquely distorted by regulators protecting the very businesses they are supposed to be monitoring that we do not see the TSA for what it really is: a collusion of government and the airline industry to outsource the latter’s safety obligations. Profits remain private, but failures and liabilities that would otherwise eat into those profits are treated as a public grievance to be redressed at public expense. And increasing the public expense is the reason d’etre of government.

The two parties differ in how the public’s purse is purloined. Democrats, for the most part, would just expand the bureaucracy. Republicans would hire “private contractors” with government money. Either way, the body scanners at $200 thousand a piece don’t have to be paid for by the airlines that rely on them, and when it’s the taxpayer’s money being spent, no one really cares what the final cost is anyway.

In spite of the multi-generational mortgage we have taken on to pay for our safety, it is difficult to prove one way or another how successful the TSA has been. No one can measure how many lives were not lost because of its existence. Based on an undercover audit of the TSA conducted in 2015, however, we do know that 67 out of 70 testers posing as passengers were let through the security gates carrying prohibited weapons and explosives, a 95.7% rate of failure.

Perhaps the airport screeners were having a bad day, which is bound to happen when your paycheck depends on the demagogues in Congress agreeing to a compromise on immigration policy.

Olive, the family dog, is a European through and through, and has shown no enthusiasm for the repatriation of her humans to the United States. The noise and stir of gadgets being disassembled and boxes being packed arouses her from time to time to stand and sniff, but for the most part she prefers to keep her distance.

She has her reasons for being skeptical. In America, she will have no free university education or health care, and public transportation is practically non-existent.

I’ve tried to explain to her several times that the free stuff in Europe costs somebody something, and that truly free markets can provide just about anything imaginable at a lower total cost to both buyer and seller. That the problem in American markets is that, not only are they not free, but are among the most captive in history, or at least since the fall of the Iron Curtain. Alas, economics is not her strong suit, as is true of dogs generally, except perhaps for the Tyrolean Hound or the Austrian Pinscher.

Our timetable for moving has been far more hurried since we abandoned our plans to cruise home on Queen Mary II, the last true liner on the seven seas. The original idea was that, while the missus and I lounged about on the floating buffet with a round-the-clock happy hour, arriving at New York harbor refreshed and un-jet-lagged, Olive would hang with the pack in the kennel and remain the whole voyage at sea-level. This was a critical part of our travel plans, ever since I learned from a friend that dogs of her breed can explode at high altitudes.

I’ve since learned that it is not quite as dramatic as that, but short-nosed breeds have respiratory problems in the thinner atmospheres that can sometimes be fatal. To be fair, my friend might have stated it this way, and I simply misheard, preoccupied as I was with visions of high tea and low-stakes canasta on the HMS Who Cares, I’m Retired Now.

As I have accumulated over three months of annual leave (a veteran bureaucrat of more than thirty years, I learned long ago to take my vacations at work), the plan was that we would have time to relax, make a few excursions about the continent, and have our last Midsommar holiday in Sweden before returning to the New World. When I went to book our passage two months ago, there were still cabins available. The kennel, however, had a waiting list of eighteen months to two years.

“How was I supposed to know?”I replied to a wife beside herself with tears. “I didn’t even know I was going to retire eighteen months ago.” Several weeks have passed and I’m still perplexed that there evidently exists a subset of society so habituated to liner-travel that they know to schedule passage for their pets before their pets are even born. I was under the impression that the uber-rich have their own yachts, and set sail with whatever Siberian Tigers, Red-fronted Macaws, concubines and circus acts they feel like bringing aboard at the last minute. What’s the point of being rich, otherwise?

It turns out, fortunately, Lufthansa has a program for transporting dogs too large to fit beneath the seat in the passenger cabin, even Frenchies, in a pressurized, climate-controlled, and ventilated cargo hold. The caveat is that at no point on the journey can the tarmac be thirty degrees Celsius (eighty degrees Fahrenheit) or higher. She takes off in Gothenburg, Sweden, where, if it gets that hot at all, will not be before August. Frankfurt, Germany, where she transfers, is not guaranteed, but would probably be OK. Washington, DC, where she lands, is almost certain to be a tropical swamp before Memorial Day.

Hence the flurry of activity around the house that Olive is doing her best to ignore. Unbeknownst to her, she leaves for Gothenburg this morning and will arrive two days hence at Dulles International Airport, where my daughter has graciously agreed to pick her up and care for her until we arrive nine days following.

We are double- and triple-checking the paperwork. She will be travelling under her EU passport — a birthright that doesn’t transfer to me or my wife. Unconditional birthright citizenship for humans is offered by only thirty countries, none of them in Europe. This is a proof of US superiority I’d love to throw in the face of my liberal friends, were the American president not trying, against his usual instincts, to bring this policy in closer alignment with those of the countries he despises. Meanwhile, no nation on earth has established a path to citizenship for owners of “anchor dogs,” which could have made the difference in where we retired.

Olive has her vaccinations and all the CDC paperwork that must accompany her throughout the journey. We tucked some extra copies in her luggage in case she chews up the originals. She can be spiteful of bureaucracy, which is one of the reasons we didn’t take her seven months ago on the big haul of precious metals from our apartment in Sweden to a vaulting service in Delaware. One cross-eyed look at a customs agent and poof! They confiscate a sizable portion of our meager net worth.

Our adventures in not exactly smuggling gold and silver, but almost, must be saved for another time, perhaps tomorrow. Today, our concern is getting little Olive across the border safely — and legally. The outgoing Director of Homeland Security is famous for shooting her own dogs when they get out of line, so far be it for us to leave an i un-dotted or a t un-crossed when it comes to the immigration of ours, especially given that she is — I’m sorry that this even has to be mentioned in 2026 — a dog of color.

We’re now on the train to Gothenburg. Before boarding, we took her out for one last elimination in the town she grew up in. Of course, she sniffed meticulously for several minutes before picking her spot. She is not the type of girl to defecate just anywhere.

Again, thoroughly European.

After I left the army and resumed my studies in graduate school, I almost bankrupted my family writing a master’s thesis that was rightly rejected by my advisors the first time I submitted it. But instead of patching it here and there as my advisors suggested so that I could graduate a few months later in the summer, I dropped off the face of the earth, worked part-time, minimum wage jobs, and relied gratefully on my (first) wife’s income as a teacher to support us and our young children. I resurfaced several years later with a manuscript that eventually became published as The Road to Mass Democracy: Original Intent and the Seventeenth Amendment.

I won’t belabor the details which readers can find in the work itself, but I simply could not accept the suggestions of my advisors, based as they were on glaring logical contradictions promulgated for three generations by the textbook industry. So I spent hours that turned into months of digging through primary sources and following a trail of political writings that led all the way back to the Greeks and Romans. Again, I won’t re-argue my case here, but suffice to say, the professors of the Progressive Era who sat on my thesis committee were perplexed by my having to reach so far back to explain an amendment that was ratified in 1913.

At the time that I had completed my draft for re-submission, I chanced to be invited by a friend to accompany him on a warm October day to a gathering of Southern gentleman for mint-juleps and a discussion of affairs, with M.E. Bradford featured as the main speaker.

Full disclosure, although I was born in Atlanta, it was to parents who were both wanderers in their own right, who wandered to different destinies after their divorce, and raised me as a wanderer back and forth between them. Naturally, I continued to wander when I came of age. So even though I was technically born there, any affinity I have for the South is more by adoption, an outsider’s admiration, like that held by someone transplanted from New York or Pennsylvania or one of those other places where they serve unsweetened iced tea. I have always wished to share Bradford’s certainty about the sanctified inheritance of place, but living the life I have, anything I say on that topic is akin to reciting the Creeds as an agnostic who hopes them to be true.

Not being a lawyer, and having just read Robert Bork’s The Tempting of America, I naively asked Dr. Bradford if the Dred Scott decision was a case of judicial activism, inflicting slavery from the bench on States that didn’t want it. I don’t remember the entire tongue lashing that I received while a tent full of legally-trained Virginia good old boys glared at me for having such insolence. But I do remember the conclusion: that every time he came back East, M.E. Bradford made it a point to lay flowers on Justice Taney’s grave. Argumentum quia dixi!

So imagine my surprise, when discussing my thesis with perhaps the only two people at the gathering still willing to speak to me, the acquisitions editor of a university press appeared, gave me his card and asked me to send the manuscript. Long story short, when I let it circulate that my thesis was being considered for publication, my advisors stopped advising me to cut Rousseau out of my history of the Seventeenth Amendment, and I finally graduated.

It took many years and was far more difficult to get the work published than I had presumed, perhaps an instructive story to be chronicled at another time, but given the difficulty of getting my master’s degree in history, I made a half-hearted effort to apply for a PhD before deciding to spend the rest of my veteran’s educational benefits on a master’s degree in Library Science. I think it would be more accurate to refer to it as Library Practice, or Library Traditions, than “Science,” but they don’t give out master’s degrees for Practices and Traditions.

My thinking was that I could still hang around universities and do research without having to sing for my supper as an academic beholden to the political fads that inevitably underlie the main streams of university funding, which they did even thirty years ago, but far more so now. And while I always fancied myself corrupting the youth on the steps of the Agora, I am sure I dodged a bullet by not pursuing a career in the classroom. I retired yesterday as a librarian. As a professor I would have certainly blurted out something excommunicable long before I was eligible for my pension.

Despite being dragged kicking and screaming to the word processor (using floppy disks) during graduate school, and initially starting my library career as a manuscripts cataloger, it turns out I had a knack for automation and data management and an abhorrence of bottlenecks in organizational workflows. Just knowing anyone, anywhere was manually typing in information that had already been typed in somewhere else in the world would drive me to the whiteboard to diagram a better way, and if it took me two months to automate ten minutes of data entry, I considered it time well spent. It was therefore a natural transition from manuscripts cataloger to systems librarian, which tended to pay better.

I am sure to write eventually in greater detail about leaving the United States and a job as systems librarian in a prestigious university to take the position of head librarian at a small university that few people outside the maritime world have ever heard of. For now, let’s put it down to mid-life ennui: grown kids, divorce, a new marriage, and a congenital inability to torture the meaning of words and mouth the pieties required of managers at the senior level. Having automated or delegated virtually every task in my job at the time, if I wasn’t going up in the organization, the choice was stagnate or quit.

Undoubtedly, I will also have a thing or two to say about working the last seventeen years for a university in the orbit of the United Nations. I have frequently imagined some goat herder peacefully tending his flock as a truck pulls up. A squad of soldiers emerges, turns him upside down, and shakes out his loose change, which by processes outlined in various treaties and memoranda of understanding ended up in my monthly paycheck. I always wince at the thought, but it has inspired me at least to build the best collections at the lowest costs with minimal staffing, and to train our students, mostly from “developing nations” (as opposed to “declining nations”) in how to use the awesome tools of research at their disposal — courtesy of the anonymous goat herder.

So much of my work in library automation was inspired by an urge to reform the slow, tedious processes available when I was researching The Road to Mass Democracy, that, as I sit at the keyboard a day after retiring, I wonder if my library career was just one giant era of procrastination before getting on with my writing. I had obtained the domain name, dailyconstitutional.com, in the late nineties or early aughts, with the intention of writing much more prolifically. Since then I have only managed a second edition of the book and a few articles, all of which were published elsewhere, and a couple poems — published by whom? I can’t remember.

Now that I find myself with an extra forty hours a week on my hands, I hope to make up a little of the lost time. Aside from bureaucratic memos and “strategic planning” documents, my only writing experience is a book and a few long scholarly articles that were accomplished for the most part decades ago. Such writing is slow and tedious trench work that doesn’t allow an author to come up for air that frequently. I have a few of those projects on my to-do list, God willing. But I suspect I also have a knack for the editorial, the satirical, the polemical, and the shorter forms of essay that just might be suitable for a web site called The Daily Constitutional.

It will take practice and will power to keep it short (This introduction is already too long, but it still hasn’t taken more than a day to write, so it counts).

As the title suggests, it will be a daily rumination or mental walk about whatever is chapping my hide or tickling my funny bone.

For example, a few days back on the walk to work I passed a man down on one knee, trying to comfort his toddler daughter. She was crying inconsolably over what I realized, as I came closer, was a split open carton of milk that had splattered all over the sidewalk. I didn’t come close enough to hear if the father was passing on the ancient wisdom, the same in Swedish as it is in English, "Man ska inte gråta över spilld mjölk."

As there was nothing I could do to help, I walked away laughing. Surely there’s something to write about in the literal enactment of a proverb.

Well, let’s see where this goes.

Approximately two weeks ago, Oliver Anthony rose in a matter of days from a songwriter no one had ever heard of to the most streamed and downloaded musician on the internet. He owes this immaculate ascension to the chord he struck with tens of millions of listeners who feel the wretchedness of a world run by the villains in his hit song, “Rich Men North of Richmond.” Like lightning sparking dry tinder in a drought-stricken forest, Anthony’s powerful lyrics, powerfully delivered, started a word-of-mouth publicity phenomenon the “music industry” could not even dream of.

Not surprisingly, the corporate media has largely dismissed the song as “racist,” “punching down,” stereotyping welfare queens, and our favorite, “fat-phobic.” It’s a doggerel “dog whistle,” a right-wing “screed,” a “Republican anthem.”

It is true that celebrity conservatives have been outspoken in their praise, while progressive notables have been fairly consistent in their obloquy. But thousands of YouTube “reaction videos,” each with hundreds of comments, attest to the song’s popularity across ethnic and racial lines, and even national boundaries, among both of the two main genders, and many of the rank and file along the whole continuum of political leanings. The disdain from news organs that typically defend the political class in Washington, a.k.a, the Rich Men North of Richmond, as contrasted with the overwhelmingly heartfelt approval of fans from all walks of life, gives credence to journalist Glenn Greenwald’s observation that today’s politics is not about “‘left v. right’ so much as ‘pro v. anti-establishment.’”

The review by National Review Online’s Executive Editor, Mark Antonio Wright, is particularly noteworthy for being a criticism from the right (Those of us accustomed to thinking of the right-left division between monarchists and regicides in l'États généraux have never been at home with modern American usage, but for the sake of this discussion, it will have to do ). It is not difficult to imagine the torrent of epithets and vitriol he evoked after publishing his 14 August review of “Oliver Anthony’s Fuzzy Lament.” In it, Mr. Write lavished praise for the artistry and passion in Anthony’s meteoric bluegrass sensation, but expressed his consternation with “the adulation on the right for this song’s message” Wright begins his criticism with the opening (and closing) lines:

I’ve been sellin’ my soul, workin’ all day
Overtime hours for bullshit pay
So I can sit out here and waste my life away
Drag back home and drown my troubles away

The song only gets sadder from there, as Anthony mournfully sings of a nation in decline. The signs are everywhere: morbidly obese people on the dole, hungry people in the street, suicidal despair, and a class of rich, privileged rulers having no accountability for themselves, yet grasping for ever greater control over everyone else.

What incited the furor against him was Wright’s recommendation that Anthony sober up and find better paying employment. In fact, he dismissed all of the songwriter’s complaints as being basically fixable for anyone willing to confront them. Readers responded with an online pelting, charging him with being snobbishly out of touch with ordinary Americans, i.e., being pro-establishment. The following day he doubled down with a defense of his original position in an article entitled “It’s Not Condescending to Speak the Truth.” There he offered his workingman bona fides:

For the record, I’m not a rich man living north of Richmond. I’m an Okie, living in my hometown. I was raised in a middle-class family. I worked my way through college. I mowed lawns, built fences, and stood the closing shift at a convenience store. After school, I roughnecked in the west Texas oilfields for two years to pay off my student loans. Later, I joined the Marine Corps and served in the infantry. I’ve followed work to four different states and moved my family three times in seven years. My hands are rough and calloused. I know blue-collar work and what it’s like to make ends meet on blue-collar pay.

To give him his due, Wright at least acknowledges the destructive forces of Washington in what he considers Anthony’s otherwise “fuzzy lament”:

I’m neither callous nor indifferent to the suffering out there. I’m not attacking Oliver Anthony personally or disparaging his character. Indeed, I called the epidemic of overdoses, suicides, and deaths of despair a “tragedy” and a “catastrophe.” And, as I wrote, I don’t think that the federal government or our national leadership has been an innocent bystander in any of this. Of course the government has wasted avalanches of money, stoked inflation, and made it harder for your dollar to stretch to the end of the month.

But he gives it short shrift. “You won’t convince me that the first-, second-, and third-most important factors in the fracturing of our society hasn’t been — us. We the People have been the cause of our decline.”

In the Panglossian world of a National Review editor, if “you live in the United States of America in 2023 — if you’re a fit, able-bodied man, and you’re working ‘overtime hours for bullshit pay,’” the solution is simple: stop blaming others, and get to work on improving your situation. Instead of just complaining, Mr. Anthony “should consider singing about what makes America a great land — a land of opportunity, not of guaranteed success.”

Of course, Wright is not wrong in insisting that we are each responsible for our own well-being. That is the indispensable foundation of self-government. But collectively, self-governing individuals also require a regime of laws to which they give their consent, and which equally bind those who, through supposedly free and fair elections, have been delegated the authority to enforce them. Both governors and the governed must adhere to the rule of law.

The Rich Men North of Richmond behave as if they are under no such compunction. They are above the law, living prodigally without consequence, courtesy of the taxpayer. There are even plausible rumors that the most power drunk among them indulge in a sick appetite for children — of which Anthony unflinchingly accuses them: “I wish politicians would look out for miners / And not just minors on an island somewhere.”

Wright passes over this sinister pun without comment, while insisting that we, “as citizens, as men, still hold it in our power to ignore the corrosive effects of our politics and popular culture.” It’s a matter of getting on “with living the good life: get a job, get married, raise your kids up right, get involved with your church, read good books, teach your boys to hunt, be present in the lives of your family and friends, help your neighbors.”

If Write, as he claims, is not being condescending, it is hard to imagine how his criticism could be more tone-deaf. It is emphatically the elements of the good life that are under threat by the Rich Men North of Richmond, and it is getting too obvious to ignore:

Lord knows, they all just want to have total control,
Want to know what you think, want to know what you do,
And they don’t think you know, but I know that you do.

And how does Anthony know that you know? Because of the twin injustices which even the dullest of peasants inevitably can see for themselves, inflation and oppressive taxation. The song expresses the situation with raw clarity: “Yer dollar ain’t shit, and it’s taxed to no end.”

The lyricist’s crude words belie a subtly meticulous wording, to wit, your paycheck is already worthless before it gets taxed. He could have written that it’s worthless because it gets taxed, but “and it’s taxed to no end” adds a further humiliation, delivering the kick to the man who’s already down. Those who might argue that the working man doesn’t pay as much in our progressive tax scheme (as if handing over 20 or 25 percent to the imperial treasury is no small matter) are of course only thinking in terms of income. In fact, if he pays rent, he pays his landlord’s taxes. When he buys groceries, the price includes the per-item taxes on the farmer’s crop sales, the transporter’s gasoline, the grocer’s profits and the margins of anyone providing value along the whole train of transactions. This is on top of the quarter of his earnings he has already surrendered.

What is the point of a better paying job if ever increasing portions of one’s income are, directly or indirectly, surrendered to the taxman?

And what is the point of being employed at all if one’s compensation is in Federal Reserve Notes which the world since 1971 mistakenly refers to as “dollars?”

From the founding until the Nixon presidency, the dollar was always defined as a weight of gold, or gold and silver. It’s still on the books at $42.22 per troy ounce of fine gold, but only because no subsequent Congress has dared declare on paper what it is in practice, a fiat currency backed by nothing but the full-faith and credit of its issuer. Instead of the “Note” being backed by gold, for which it once served as a convenient, but redeemable, substitute, the assets now backing our circulating currency are US Treasuries and Mortgage Backed Securities. In other words, the fiat dollar is an IOU for more debt.

Once set free from a commodity not easily accumulated, the Rich Men North of Richmond could conjure these so-called dollars at will for expenditures well beyond what rapacious revenuers could squeeze out of their blood dry subjects.

But free money is never free. To the wage earner, money is a token of the time and energy that was required to earn it. To the saver, it is a backdated claim on the needs and pleasures that have been forsworn today for the uses and gratifications that can be enjoyed tomorrow. Money extends the realm over which labor can be divided, with each participant earning and storing the value he adds to the world’s wealth in a medium he can exchange for the products and services provided by others; it is pursued almost instinctively by self-governing people as a means of ensuring their freedom from want and adversity in the future. But when it is diluted with counterfeit tokens for which no labor was committed, when the claims of savers are crowded out by the claims of forgers, those actually contributing to the overall stock of wealth have their time stolen and the value of their labor diminished for the the benefit of the government, its favored interests, and its growing ranks of plebeian dependents.

If intentions may be deduced from results, making us all dependent would seem to be the goal. If every dollar is itself a debt, backed by nothing but debts that citizens are expected to repay, the ruin of the average wage worker gets closer with every dollar earned. The paycheck he depends on to keep him and his family afloat is also the millstone around his neck that eventually will drown him along with his countrymen. And he has no choice. By the law of the land he must accept as payment, and vainly try to save, the legal tender in which his property and all his economic transactions are taxed, while the purchasing power of his time and labor dwindles toward nothing. Even in what is left of the so-called private sector, he works for the state, for the Rich Men North of Richmond.

In his second attempt to explain his position, Wright takes issue with a critic to his original article who points to the decline in real wages for those at the bottom. “That’s a debatable assertion at best,” he contends, referencing but not elaborating on Michael Strain’s book, The American Dream Is Not Dead. He cites data from the US Chamber of Commerce regarding unfilled jobs and the shortage of skilled workers. For those without skills, Write helpfully suggests joining the military and shipping off to boot camp.

Whatever statistics that academicians and corporate lobbying associations might produce as proof that Americans are living in the best of times, the rest of us go to the grocery store and see fewer goods for sale, at higher prices, in smaller packages. House prices have never been higher relative to income. Practically anyone not generating gains from inflated financial assets is falling behind, out of savings and further in debt. And with scores of thousands of rules and regulations obstructing economic decision-making in every direction, opting out to start a business — the original American dream — is increasingly less attractive.

To the tone-deaf critic who assures us America has never seen better days, that life-changing improvements are merely a pay raise away, the only consideration is the quantity, not the quality, of the money being used in payment. But a single example suffices to show that our dollar “ain’t shit” compared to what it used to be. When President Johnson ordered the removal of silver from US coinage in 1965, the minimum wage was $1.25 — five quarters. The silver contained in five quarters already in circulation at that time, those minted in 1964 or earlier, would, as of this writing, command a melt value of $21. If and when silver is once again demanded as a monetary metal, it will take far more than twenty-one of today’s shitty dollars to buy those “junk silver” coins of yesteryear.

Thus, it is beyond dispute that, measured against real money, real wages have declined, and with them, the freedom of citizens trapped in the legal tender regime that borrows, spends, taxes and inflates away the fruits of their labor. “Give me control of a nation’s money supply,” Mayer Amschel Rothschild is alleged to have said, “and I care not who makes its laws.” With the coming launch of the Central Bank Digital Currency (CDBC), programmable fiat dollars can direct credit toward politically favored projects, attach expiration dates to prohibit savings, and deny spending on the part of anyone suspected of “conspiracy”, “misinformation” or showing insufficient hatred against the enemy du jour. With one’s ability to buy and sell made contingent on cooperativeness and social credit score, centralized control in this dystopian nightmare will be close to total. They will know what you think and know what you do.

A pervasive feeling of futility explains, at least partially, the nation’s rising rate of suicides, a damning bombshell Anthony delivers at the song’s crescendo. Not surprisingly, Wright retorts, “the tragedy of young men killing themselves through drink or drugs — the catastrophe of deaths of despair” is not Washington’s fault. To be sure, in that slow march of desperation, the taking of one’s own life — the final step from which there is no coming back — is always an individual choice. But given the dramatic uptick in the number of Americans resorting to this fatal decision, particularly among one demographic, it is not unreasonable to suggest some of the blame might be laid on a legal and social environment that is indifferent, if not hostile, to their continued existence. The songwriter is considerably less equivocal:

Young men are puttin’ themselves six feet under ground
’Cause all this damn country does is keep on kicking them down.

In suggesting the regime’s culpability in the self-destruction of its young men, it is important to note that the narrator has not taken that course himself. He is still standing, defiantly roaring his protest. Even more so must we make the distinction between the narrator’s words and the stated beliefs of the songwriter who wrote them, the distinction between the art and the artist. In his self-recorded introduction to the song, Oliver Anthony remarks, “This life is a beautiful opportunity, and I don’t care where you are or what you’ve done, where you think your life is heading. Everything can change in a moment. As long as you’re above the dirt, you’ve got a fightin’ chance.”

Antonio Wright’s criticism fails to make these distinctions. He therefore misinterprets the song as a dirge of hopelessness rather than an anthem of revolt against powerful people who no longer even try to hide their tyranny. For every complaint in the song, Wright has a practical solution. He betrays the less than helpful attitude of the husband who doesn’t understand that his wife isn’t asking him to provide a solution. She just wants to be heard.

Although he does not specifically address Anthony’s line, “We got folks in the street ain’t got nothing to eat,” we can assume he takes issue with it on the grounds that just about anyone can work his way out of that predicament, if he so chooses. Undoubtedly, the downward trail that leads to sleeping on grates follows many of what the grackles in the self-help industry term “bad personal decisions.” In most cases Mr. Wright’s universal prescription to pick up one’s life and make oneself useful is precisely what the doctor should order. But putting the line within the context of the rest of the verse reveals a larger complaint about which the striving, self-reliant, can-do American has no means of redress:

We got folks in the street ain’t got nothing to eat,
and the obese milking welfare.
Well God! If you're five foot three and weigh three hundred pounds
taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds.

The lyrics don’t say whether those folks in the street are starving because of government action, or its inaction, but they do point out the glaring discrepancy between the alleged aims of government’s humanitarian programs and their obscene results. Adding insult to injury, anyone who has a job, especially a high paying one such as Wright recommends, is underwriting this obscenity without having any say in the matter. We wonder what he would recommend to the farmers forced to quarter troops in Sam Adam’s day. Perhaps: “Grow more crops, and then you can afford a bigger house.”

The reason this song has received such world wide attention and “adulation” — from all quarters, not just from the right — is its resonance with everyday people experiencing these systemic obstacles and roadblocks to their pursuit of happiness. The compliance and the workarounds are increasingly more time-consuming, less effective and are grinding them down. Finally, somebody has stood up and called “bullshit” on the whole authoritarian establishment

Write’s mistake is in seeing Mr. Anthony’s song as simply a catalog of things gone wrong, a consignment of blame and, by implication, a cry for some sort of amelioration. It is Write’s inference that is dead wrong. There is nothing to indicate that Mr. Anthony is appealing to government for anything, except for it to lift its boot off the neck “of people like you, and people like me.”

Whether in the form of ninety-nine theses nailed to the church door, or a declaration of the “long train of abuses and usurpations” dispatched to the monarch reigning overseas, revolutions begin with a catalog of grievances against the current order. The list eventually destined for the Capitol will be considerably longer. Rough lyrics will be rephrased with legal precision. But thanks to Oliver Anthony, the Rich Men North of Richmond are on notice that it is coming.